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It is my duty to revive this old topic. CAUTION!!! STAY AWAY FROM ORBIT DOWNLOADER.

As posted in another thread, when my trial version of NetTransport expired about 6 months ago, I looked for free alternatives. Orbit Downloader was the Download Manager that came forward, and seemed to do the job in the first days. Why pay for something when I can get something similar for free? or so I thought.

After a few weeks, I could not control Orbit Downloader. Every link I clicked in my browser opened an Orbit pop up and a few seconds later, my entire ADSL connection was down. I regularly got choppy phone calls with my IP phone, my ADSL line went down at random intervals. This was a nightmare.

I even had a technician from my ISP company come into my house and trouble shoot my internet connection for 3 hours. He could not find anything wrong with the connection. The fact is that Orbit Downloaded was launching DoS attacks from my laptop and my ADSL router shut itself down in protection.

I then removed Orbit Downloader, tried to clean as much of the registry as possible. I still get intermitted ADSL cuts which might still be caused by some infection I got from Orbit, who knows?

The best decision I made was to purchase NetTransport. I am not a big fan of spending money on software, but this is one of the 2 pieces of software that I actually bought (Microsoft Windows / Office apart). The other one is SpaceMonger, a fantastic visualizer of the files on my hard drive.

Removing Orbit Downloader and purchasing NetTransport has been worth every penny of my $29.95 investment.

Absolutely agree. When my trial version of NetTransport expired, I looked for free alternatives. Orbit Downloader was the Download Manager that came forward, and seemed to do the job in the first days. Why pay for something when I can get something similar for free? or so I thought.

After a few weeks, I could not control Orbit Downloader. Every link I clicked in my browser opened an Orbit pop up and a few seconds later, my entire ADSL connection was down. I regularly got choppy phone calls with my IP phone, my ADSL line went down at random intervals. This was a nightmare.

I even had a technician from my ISP company come into my house and trouble shoot my internet connection for 3 hours. He could not find anything wrong with the connection. The fact is that Orbit Downloaded was launching DoS attacks from my laptop and my ADSL router shut itself down in protection.

I then removed Orbit Downloader, tried to clean as much of the registry as possible. I still get intermitted ADSL cuts which might still be caused by some infection I got from Orbit, who knows?

The best decision I made was to purchase NetTransport. I am not a big fan of spending money on software, but this is one of the 2 pieces of software that I actually bought (Microsoft Windows / Office apart). The other one is SpaceMonger, a fantastic visualizer of the files on my hard drive.

Removing Orbit Downloader and purchasing NetTransport has been worth every penny of my $29.95 investment.

Synergy seems to be a dormant project for some time, it is good to come up with alternatives.

I work at home on 2 different networks: 1 my home ADSL, the other one my company LAN network (through VPN). The limitation of Synergy is that both computers have to be on the same LAN, so I cannot use the mouse of my comptuer on my company LAN to control my computer on my house ADSL LAN.

Is this also the assumption with the likes of inputdirector, "mouse without borders", "share mouse" or is any of these able to re-use the mouse & keyboard of a computer on a LAN network to control a computer on a different LAN?

As far as I know, app-specific volume control is built into Vista and above.

Where is this sound control? In the Windows 7 control panel, there is something called "Manage audio devices". On the tab called "Communications", "Windows can automatically adjust the volume of different sounds when using the PC to place or receive telephone calls". Other than that, I see no setting for the volume per application.

I also have a "smartaudio" icon in the control panel but it does not give me the choice to select the audio level per application.

Could someone help me find the app-specific volume controls in Windows 7?

If the option is not there in SyncBackSE, then have you asked for it in their forums? I don't see no technical reason why file rename detection is present for syncs and not backups. If you can make your case in the forums, they'll include it.

I have been using a Microsoft trackball for 3-4 years. The concept is very good as I don't have much desk space to move the mouse around.

However, the major drawback is mechanical. The ball touches the mouse body in 3 points. The dust tends to stack around these points. So I have to clean the mouse around these points every other day. The drawback is that when dust gathers, the resistance increases and the mouse pointer moves very slowly.

I would say life span for mouses based on this technology is 3-4 years.

Keep away from Samsung. I bought the 350N (color laser). Their customer service is terrible. The technician came 6 times into my house to try to repair it. Total waste of time on calls to the customer service center. I won't buy anything from Samsung anymore.

I looked for a good contact manager software to use in my job hunt. I wanted to track whom I had met, store notes of our meetings, track thank-you notes, emails, etc. I could not find a decent contact manager program, so I turned to CRM. I use vtiger (open source CRM uploaded to my server, so that I can access it from any PC, lots of other useful features like webmail integration). I am very pleased with it and hardly goes a day without my using it.

I had the same requirements. First tried SugarCRM, but found too many bugs. Then switched to vtiger. vtiger uses the same engine as SugarCRM, but its interface and features are much easier to get used to.

I am extremely pleased with vtiger. vtiger is 100% open source and free (as in free beer), all you need is a server running Linux or Windows with a recent php and mysql version installed. Just dump the files to your server, follow the instructions and get full web access.

In this case, you open a file (text file for example) with a special software which has line highlighting capabilities. I think that this thread is more about a desktop productivity tool that draws a bar above any window (a web browser, a mail client, whatever). What I am saying is that by analyzing pixels in the vicinity of the bar, it should be fairly easy to auto-detect lines. Of course, the bar should be above a window with text in it.